OK, we know which is the biggest (for now at least), my question is; which do you think is best, Zoopla or Rightmove and why?

This all started with a tweet (embedded below) but then I decided to make this an open discussion and several Estate Agents and Letting Agents have since responded as you will see when you scroll down.

Please feel free to add your own comments.

If you want a bit of free PR feel free to log in with Twitter or Facebook and create a link back to your business website.

@iamalandlord must say we are getting more leads from Zoopla than rightmove at the moment

We’ve had a fantastic response from Vivastreet in our area (Leicester). Costs about £7 to have your advert re-issued (ie brought back to the top of the pages) every day for a month.. Lots of people must use it or we wouldn’t have got the response. Better than our local papers at £78 for 4 nights!!

I dont use Rightmove because of their Dick Turpin attitude to costs. I prefer Zoopla even before the merger I was getting more leads and better quality of applicants from them over Find a Property. however post merger its working well for me. I also advertise on a few other minor portals but to be honest the leads and hits are very poor. I can see Zoopla overtaking Rightmove in 12-18 months time, but, like most agents are hoping they keep the fee structure to where it is now, the same package with Rightmove would cost me about 7 times more, and i have to weigh up is it worth 80% of my advertising budget, when I can best use the money in other avenues.
I think the public are now more versed in searching online and most of my clients know Zoopla as well as Rightmove. Watch this space as they say…

There is absolutely no doubt that Zoopla have moved forward massively in the last 6 months. They are much more involved in industry events and with their HUGE B to C marketing campaigns they are definitely starting to establish themselves with potential house buyers and sellers. However, the reality is that Rightmove still dominate in the minds of both the general public and estate agents. Speaking to agents around the country, most, though not all, say that the quality of Zoopla leads is also poorer than Rightmove.I also think that Zoopla have a problem with operating at least three brands (Zoopla, Primelocation and Findaproperty).This is still confusing-well it is to me!
However, it can only be a good thing that the mighty Rightmove (who I have always found to be excellent) are facing much stiffer competition.

Our RM account manager is a superstar, but their prices are extortionate. Also, when we were starting up a few years ago they just didn’t care about giving new businesses a break; their attitude was very much ‘we’re the biggest, you need us more than we need you, so take it or leave it’.

Our leads are about 50:50 from RM/ZPG, which makes ZPG better value by miles. Unfortunately their customer service is poor, or at least that’s been our experience. If they can sort out this side of the business they would be a clear winner for us. How long it will be before they adopt a RM pricing strategy, though?

Like, probably most letting agents, The Letting People monitor our advertising spend regularly and there isn’t really a choice between either Rightmove or Zoopla as we need both to cover as many potential tenants’ and landlords’ choices as possible.

From our point of view, Rightmove always wins in terms of speed. When a property is first ‘made visible’ to the public it appears almost instantly on Rightmove. Enquiries for popular properties can therefore start to come into the business within a few minutes. Zoopla property updates seem to take 1-2 hours to become visible which can be a problem if the property is advertised
after 4pm. To date, Rightmove also seems to attract more potential landlords to contact us for appraisal appointments.

Rightmove also seem to be streets ahead in terms of social media with, for example over
21,000 followers on Twitter and regular tweets throughout the day, compared to 14,000
Zoopla followers and very few tweets in comparison. We also have a good relationship with our
account manager at Rightmove who is always available with useful ideas on making our properties stand out.

However, Zoopla still attracts nearly 1 out of 3 enquiries and we would not want to lose about 30% of our customers! Now that it has merged with Primelocation, FindaProperty, and Globrix, etc we would expect the percentage of enquiries from Zoopla to increase – should be interesting to see what happens.

We believe that competition between the two is probably a healthy way forward with each wanting
to be ahead in finding innovative ways to attract more properties and more hits to their respective websites.

It’s a bit like asking customers to choose between Marks & Spencer Food and Waitrose – both
are good but, in our opinion, M&S have more outlets and better advertising, so usually get our custom. It all comes down to what your preferred “cup of tea” is, and the fact that it’s good to
have a choice!

We’re with Lettingweb which, as well as posting properties on that site, rolls them out to Zoopla and a number of other portals with a high profile in the Scottish Market. We looked at Rightmove but were unimpressed by their website and found them considerably more expensive than Lettingweb/Zoopla.

So far, Zoopla are generating an impressive numvber of teant leads but we’ve still to see a landlord enquiry.

I suppose you get what you pay for. My conclusion as a landlord, who occasionally uses letting agents to manage my more distant properties, is to use letting agents who use all portals. Unsurprisingly they tend to charge a bit more but an extra 1% or 2% management fee is significantly cheaper than a months rental void.

Tracking where a lead comes from does not tell you that much as a lot of people use both sites. (You only really care about the people that use only one of the sites, .e.g the people you would not get without being on that site.) Also personally when I see a property on RightMove, I will go to efforts to find another phone number for the agent to avoid the expansive phone call var the RightMove tracking system.

It would be interesting if a large landlord would advertise
a) One thirds of the propterites on both site
b) One third just on Rightmove
c) And One third just on Zoopla
It will have to be truly random how each property was advertised and a large sample size. Then record how long the voids are and how good the talents turn out to be, this would enable the real costs/benefits to be worked out.

I am very concerned when I see an agent not using both sites, as the agent may have decided that an addition weeks void cost them only about £10 when it costs me about £90, so decided it is more cost effect for THEM to only use a single site, as they only get 10% of the benefit of a quicker let. Therefore at present I am unlikely to consider an agent that does not use both sites, it is just not worth the risk of a longer void.